The Cannes film festival opens on May 11 and runs until May 22. There are 20 movies in the main competition, but many out-of-competition pictures will generate just as much, if not more, interest.

9. Melancholia
How can Danish director Lars Von Trier follow "Antichrist", his 2009 Cannes entry which shocked audiences with its graphic *** scenes and extreme violence? Melancholia has got critics chattering, with Kirsten Dunst playing a bride at a wedding set against impending disaster -- a planet called Melancholia is on collision course with Earth.

7. This Must Be the Place
Penn gets his second Cannes outing in Paolo Sorrentino's in-competition film in which he plays a 50-year-old ex-rocker who travels across the United States to avenge his father's death.

10. Sleeping Beauty
Australian Julia Leigh is one of four female directors in the main competition, an unusually high number. Sleeping Beauty stars Emily Browning as Lucy, a young university student drawn into a disturbing parallel life as a sedated ********** who remembers nothing about her encounters with old men who demand absolute submission.

6. Ichimei/Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
The prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike presents what has been billed as the first 3-D movie to make it into the main competition in Cannes. The tale of honour and revenge is a re-imagining of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 classic "Harakiri".